Five The Hierophant - Through Aureate Void review
Band: | Five The Hierophant |
Album: | Through Aureate Void |
Style: | Jazz, Avantgarde metal, Post-metal |
Release date: | February 2021 |
A review by: | RaduP |
01. Leaf In The Current
02. Fire From Frozen Cloud
03. Berceuse
04. Pale Flare Over Marshes
05. The Hierophant II
Do you enjoy Neptunian Maximalism's jazz drone, but don't have the patience for a 2h album? Do you enjoy Dark Buddha Rising's psychedelic doom, but wish it had more jazz? You're in the right place!
Putting a genre tag on Five The Hierophant isn't hard because their sound would be all over the place, since the sound itself is fairly streamlined and already has its fair share of contemporaries and precursors, it's mostly hard because we haven't really came up with a convincing genre tag without plastering "jazz", "psychedelic", "ambient", "atmospheric", "dark", and "post" all over the place. But it shares so much in common with Terra Tenebrosa, Neptunian Maximalism, Wolvennest, Dark Buddha Rising, Oranssi Pazuzu (and the bunch of projects that the two have collaborated on), and you can also extend it further in two directions: a certain brand of psychedelic metal (Bong, Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard, Ufomammut) and jazz metal (Ex Eye, Imperial Triumphant, Shining (NOR)). Using words like "stoner", "doom" or "black metal" would just feel weird, because there's little in common with other bands of the type compared to the ones I listed.
Genre pedantics out of the way, my rant should be read more like a list of "For fans of" than an actual call for music journalists to get off their assess and come up with better genre tags like they did in the 90s, especially since I'm not coming up with a proposal myself. I'm only proposing that we all take a trip Through Aureate Void. A lot of the album's qualities can already be guessed from the list of similar bands, in that it would feature a significant non-metal component, have a strong emphasis on atmosphere, through long-winded repetition and infusions of said non-metal component. You would be right, but you wouldn't be able to guess just how effectively Five The Hierophant merge jazz, oriental music, dark ambient into something truly seductive and hypnotic. Indeed, hypnotic might be a better word than psychedelic, mostly because it implies a tad more malevolence, which Through Aureate Void has in spades.
The album's metal component is quite outshined by those aforementioned outside influences. With the album being completely instrumental, there are no harsh vocals to tip the scale, and massive distorted riffs are metal's only weapon while being sunken in hypnotic dirges of warm saxophones. Said riffs are thankfully very groovy and bass-heavy, and do much to increase said sense of malevolence. Evil fuzz, so to say. But everything combines into a soup of dark sounds, one that integrates instruments like the saxophone more fully rather than using them as occasional spice, and whose repetitive and slowly progressing nature doesn't kill any of its momentum. It builds a great sense of atmosphere, partly through its magnificent and lush production, but its greatest strength is maintaining said atmosphere. It's 51 minutes of consuming the wrong paste and being transported to a malignant antediluvian realm.
Five The Hierophant have few years and releases under their belt, but they've used the Magnetic Sleep Tapes to explore the occult ambient side of the sound crafted on their debut, 2017's Over Phlegethon. And now the fruit of that experimentation is clearly felt on the increased skill in creating and sustaining ambiance here. It is not the record's only strength, but Through Aureate Void breathes evil ambiance.
![]() | Written on 08.03.2021 by Doesn't matter that much to me if you agree with me, as long as you checked the album out. |
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